BilikFamily.com

There are some days when you feel like everything is going wrong, but lately I have had a lot to be thankful to God for. Call it Thanksgiving in February, if you'd like.

Mom - First and foremost, my mom is doing well. The chemotherapy is over, the surgery is over, and the tests came back clean. But best of all, she and dad will drive out and visit next week! Health and weather permitting, they'll be out during the girls' winter break. We are so excited to see some family again. It seems like forever since we've seen family.

Commute - Second, the new job is fine. All the promised final checks from my last employer came through without any last minute changes or fine print. I'm okay with the commute and the new work is interesting. The drive, although an hour long, is mostly off the main highways. I think that the Garmin Nuvi GPS is very cool and helps pass the time. It plays MP3 files while I drive and continuously updates the moving map. At critical points it pauses the audio file, speaks the directions (including the street name!), and then resumes what it was playing. Today I ordered an adaptor for my car's factory radio so that auxiliary audio can be jacked in where the OEM had put an expansion header for a CD changer. While the GPS does audio natively, it sounds like it's coming from a handheld radio. Sending it directly into the car's audio system should sound worlds better.

Office - Meanwhile at the office I'm currently learning about the graphics architecture and slinging some perl code to do format conversion. While it doesn't matter much to me, I have a desk setup that a high end gamer would kill for. It's a high end Pentium system with a very nice ATI graphics card (natch) driving two side-by-side 21 inch monitors. That same setup is in nearly every cubicle. In posters around the facility you see layouts of the various chips that they've done in the past and a few posters of Ruby, the ATI mascot babe usually seen at trade shows. At the front reception area is a setup showing off the Xbox 360 system.

Power outages - We've had some very windy weather Friday and Saturday. One of the things we're especially thankful for is that we were able to keep power. Hundreds of thousands of New Englanders were without power for an extended time this past weekend due to tree limbs falling on power lines. Work crews, including some from out of state, were working overtime trying to restore power. Unlike the city, when we lose power, it kills our water well pumps as well. In other words, toilets don't flush unless you fill them manually.

I think the fact that our neighborhood has underground utilities helped increase our odds of not being affected. We had several of the girls' friends over whose houses didn't have power. It helped out the parents while they tried to find ways to keep their houses in order.

Those high winds ushered in some bitter cold temperatures for a few days. We watched a bunch of our DVDs over the weekend: Zathura, Wallace and Gromit, The Parent Trap. To get away from all the hustle and bustle of children, Michelle and I went out to The Pasta Loft for dinner last night.

Kid Fun - For the kids there are a few nice new releases. First, Little Einsteins put out another new episode today: “The Northern Night Light”. I was also happy for the kids when I found out the Hampton the Hamster songs were available now on iTunes. What small kid doesn't enjoy dancing to The Hamster Dance?